5 Reasons You Should Hate Professional Sports

I am not a sportser. I do not sport, nor do I mingle among sportsed or sporting folk. And what you have to understand is that for people who grew up not caring about professional sports, being a "sports fan" seems just as weird and alien as being a brony, a furry, or a comedy writer. Scheduling your day around a game that other people play and having an emotional response to whether they win or lose seems super weird to me, sure, and I'll make jokes about how dumb you are ("You sure are dumb!" I'll say, and then laugh and laugh, slapping my belly to add a rhythmic punctuation to my chortles), but I won't actually make the argument that what you're doing is bad for society. OK, fine: Yes, I totally will. Right now. In this very article.

Now, I don't think sportings themselves are bad. Competition and having fun outside are great for the body and soul, I'm told, and I wouldn't want to take that away from anyone. No no no, the institution of professional athletics is the festering pile of social ills that I'm tackling today. Because it's the worst fucking thing. Just the worst.

#5. Sports Team Names Are Stupid

Let's start off with something simple, factual, and non-controversial: College sports team names are dumb. Every single one of them. Literally as dumb as a butt.

People have been arguing for decades in defense of naming a sports team after a racist turd-snorter. That's where these priorities are right now. Which should make it less surprising that ...

#4. College Sports Are Bad for Schools

Varsity sports are fucking a big, bloody hole right in the center of the American education system, and laughing the entire time. If we did away with all varsity sports -- yes, all of it, today -- the world would be a better place. I'm serious, why do we play sports in college at all? What's the fucking purpose? Aren't those supposed to be schools? Aren't we supposed to be teaching people about the real world?

Comstock Images/Stockbyte/Getty Like the importance of bow ties.

"But sports bring in money!" you spit desperately at your computer screen. No, they don't: Sports teams are actually massive financial drains on their colleges, with only 10 percent turning a profit. Most colleges end up more like the University of Michigan, which lost $7 million over two seasons.

"But that's good for the college's prestige!" you cry deliriously, flapping your elbows like bird wings and rubbing peanut butter on your exposed chest (it's so easy to make you sound ridiculous when I'm describing you, and also you're fictional). Ah yes, you poor fool, you've fallen directly into my trap: Sports have no correlation with academic prestige. Ivy League schools consistently suck at sports, refusing to award scholarships for athletics or compromise academic standards, and that's never stopped them from being Ivy League fucking schools. So sports are less a source of prestige and more of an alternative to it. So unless you can tell me how the $450 million spent renovating this stadium at Texas A&M University wouldn't have been better directed toward, say, the faculty or academic resources, I'll just stick with the fact that college sports are awful and can go to hell.

And that's just the beginning. Because once you move beyond college, you realize ...

You might think that this is justified because it's an investment in the community, but that's not true either: According to every analysis of subsidies for sports teams, they suck money right on out of the community and into the pockets of the rich folks behind the scenes. And the players, obviously. Our tax money is just offsetting the costs for the billionaires -- even though the enterprise would already be profitable. Did I mention that the NFL is a nonprofit organization that pays its commissioner $30 million a year?

I realize I'm throwing a lot of numbers at you in a comedy article, so just think about this: Why is this money being spent at all? This is a fucking game, right? As a writer, all I need is a living wage to be happy to spend all day writing, so why are we giving athletes -- people who basically go to summer camp and the gym for a living -- multimillion dollar contracts? Surely we're not worried they're going to leave the industry and become neurosurgeons. The only thing a football team can lose its star player to is another football team. So we're basically watching billionaires play a private stock market while we pay for the privilege of sweeping the floor.

RAYES/Digital Vision/Getty ImagesThis is us. This is us.

The crazy thing about this to me is that the reason we (and by "we" I mean "virtually everyone but me and like 20 people I know") like sports, on a psychological level, is because they're a respite from things we have to worry about. When you spend all day hearing about, say, Ebola (Holy shit! Ebola!), it's nice to focus on something silly, like someone throwing a football around. It's nice to get worked up about that, even -- to let some steam off. Who cares? It doesn't matter -- or at least it shouldn't. We're spending so much money on it that it kinda does: It's your money getting sucked down the drain, and you just stare blankly while ...